If you can't get enough of flailing your arms at your T.V screen to control the action in your favorite Kinect or PlayStation Move game, you should be pretty excited to know that you'll soon be able to do the same on the smaller screen of your smartphone.

A report by ABI Research predicts that as many as 600 million smartphones will contain some form of gesture recognition within 5 years, though there are still considerable hurdles to overcome in their implementation. These include overcoming differing light conditions, and handling the heavy power consumption that would be a serious drain on batteries (and battery drainage is known to cause users to throw their hands up in the air in frustration, with or without gesture recognition present).

There is the question of just how valuable gesture recognition is in a device that's mostly held in the hand and controlled by the fingers of said hand as is. And with the rise in voice recognition on top of that, which takes 100% less gesture effort (unless one counts the movement of their lips and the flicking of their tongue as gestures), there doesn't seem to be all that great of a need for gesture recognition in mobile devices. Still, ABI sees a lot of potential uses for the technology in smartphones and tablets.

"These tracking solutions give smartphone OEMs and app designers some attractive techniques for new interactions and enhancing the user's experience. Additionally, gesture recognition will be useful for media tablets, portable media players, and portable game players. It is projected a higher percentage of media tablets will have the technology than smartphones."

Smartphone and tablet makers clearly agree, as several companies are planning to incorporate the technology in their future devices. Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor will allow various tracking methods that could allow gesture technology to be incorporated into programs and apps. Texas Instruments likewise predicted it would add gesture recognition to phones by late 2012.

And with a 97% greater chance to look silly in front of strangers, and a 99.5% greater chance of 'accidentally' hitting one of those strangers with a gesture chop (and how soon until there's an app to track how many strangers you've gesture chopped?), there are certainly some positives (those are positives right?) the technology will bring to the streets.

Do you want gesture recognition in your smartphone or tablet? Or is it a mostly useless feature that will be overhyped by phone makers to sell new products? Let us know by using some finger gestures to type us out a comment.